Pet peeves

August 04, 2013

Both Sleep Country and Toyota Canada
have radio ad campaigns going on now with similar themes:

"Things that do (or do not) go
together."

Great advertising minds thinking alike?

Or the same agency getting paid twice
for the same idea?

I dunno.

If the latter, how clever! Sounds like
a freelance journalist.

But whether it's mismatched box spring
and mattress (Sleep Country) or balloons and thumbtacks (the example
in one of the Toyota ads), I've got another pair of things that don't
go together:

Motorcycles and flip-flops.

I kid you not. Saw this on the street
in The Big Smoke last week.

OK, it was more of a scooter than a
motorcycle.

But flip-flops?

Come on.

The law requires you to wear a helmet
when on a motorcycle. Do we really need to pass a law to prevent you
from wearing flip-flops? Is there no common sense?

Well, I guess not - after all, the guy
was riding a motorcycle in traffic...

It's bad enough - and extremely
dangerous - to wear flip-flops or even sandals in a car, because it's
way too easy to catch the edge of that sort of footwear on a pedal
and cause a major issue.

But on two wheels?

Stupid.

Now, I'm not condemning all
motorcyclists. Only a few minutes later I saw a guy on a Harley-Davidson - big ol' hog (the bike), painted yellow, chrome all
over the place.

Not to stereotype anyone, but Harley
riders often play fast and loose with the helmet law - wearing World
War I German army helmets, or some plastic concoction that wouldn't
protect a cantaloupe falling off the kitchen table.

But this guy had a proper helmet, and
full leathers. Hot, sure - but when the inevitable happens, as it
eventually does to all motorcyclists, at least the paramedics won't
have to scrape this guy's skin off the pavement.

So get serious, flip-flop-wearing two-wheeler. My taxes are paying
for your health care.

I don't eschew all marginally
precarious behaviour. I downhill ski, I race cars, I rally cars, I
even hang-glid once (what IS the past tense of 'hang-glide'?)

As regular readers know, I think - and no
reasoning person could possibly argue - that riding in traffic on
two wheels, motorized or otherwise, is deadly dangerous at the best of
times. In a three-dimensional world, two wheels is at least one too
few.

But if you are going to do it, fer
cryin' out loud, take the barest minimum of precautions, won't you?

August 03, 2013

Following up on my post of a couple of
weeks ago about the stream of black soot emanating from a Diesel
transport truck on 401 near Mississauga Road, Lady Leadfoot told me
about being behind a truck with 'Diesel Doctor' written on it,
stopped at a traffic light here in beautiful downtown Milton.

As it pulled away on the green, a
similar cloud of black smoke poured out of this truck's exhaust.

"I could barely make out the
truck!" she exclaimed.

She says it was gray; I saw another pick-up today with the same logo on it, a white Ram with the Cummins Diesel engine.

Likewise, "smoke pourin' black as coal", to quote Dave Dudley ("Six Days on the Road").

An InterTube search indicates that
"Diesel Doctor" is a vehicle repair shop in Milton which advertises itself as being "Diesel Pickup Truck Repair and Performance Specialists".

As regular readers know, I'm a big Diesel fan. I currently own two. No, not pick-ups, but Diesels nonetheless - VW TDI wagons, one Jetta (350,000 km) and one Passat (250,000 km).

Terrific cars.

Given that I think we should be encouraging people to switch to Diesel to save fuel and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and given that one of the main issues the general public has with Diesels is that they are smoky and smelly, it seems to me that for a firm which claims to be expert on all things Diesel, their own vehicles should set a better example.

Their web site is also full of shots of Diesel pickups emitting huge plumes of black smoke.

July 31, 2013

Highway 25 - sorry; 'Regional Road 25',
since the province pawned it off on the Regional Municipality of
Halton during the Mike Harris era - has been widened from two to
four lanes north of Highway 401 up to Number 5 Sideroad.

The construction started about the same
time as the pyramids.

I can't tell you how many different ways that
piece of road was torn up. Digging here, digging there, with the road
layout seemingly changing twice a day.

At one point there was even a southbound detour through the adjacent industrial park.

I can only assume they put in
sanitary sewers, unsanitary sewers, storm sewers, water mains, electrical conduits,
fibre-optic cables, maybe pneumatic tubes for the transportation systems of the future.

Each project seemingly done totally independently of the other, so a fresh dig each time.

Then all of a sudden, they tossed some
asphalt over it all, painted lines on it, and it was done.

Here's what it looks like now, southbound from the intersection of Regional Road 25 and Number 5 Sideroad:

Looks pretty normal, doesn't it?

Exactly.

Which means they made two grievous
errors.

One of them could be fixed by the
application of a few litres of white paint and a new sign. Where the northbound road
reverts to one lane in each direction north of Number 5 Sideroad, the right lane
disappears, merging into the passing lane.

As you can almost see here - the sign (the one that needs changing) on the far right shows you what's wrong; the actual merge is just over that little hill:

Southbound, the opposite happens - the
'new' lane is created to the right.

Come on, people.

When you need to add a lane to a road,
you add it to the left, creating a passing lane.

When you need to lose a lane, you chop
it from the left, eliminating the passing lane.

The right lane is the driving lane; how
can it EVER disappear?

What the hell do they teach in Urban
Planning and Civil Engineering classes anyway?

Does nobody in the Ministry of Transportation read Canada's biggest automotive publication? Since those people build roads, wouldn't you think someone there would have at least a passing interest in cars?

Or do they just sit there laughing, saying, "There goes Kenzie again hahahaha..."

Or do they know something about highway design that has escaped me over the 30 years I've been whining about this? (Anything is possible...).

But if that IS the case, why doesn't somebody clue me in about what I'm missing?

From my perspective, how are we ever going to get people to
"Drive Right" as common sense, courtesy, traffic flow, driving safety
and The Law demand, if the design of the road network actively
discourages it?

They could repaint those lane markings and erect a new sign in an evening, and do it right.

True, eventually they might have to paint the lines again when Regional Road 25 north of Number 5 Sideroad gets expanded. Not in my lifetime...

The second flaw to the redesign of this
highway is more egregious, because we won't likely have another
opportunity to fix it for another fifty years when it will be
time for a further update.

There were at least four opportunities
to put roundabouts in that road.

They missed them all.

So now traffic typically grinds to a
halt four times in about a kilometre and a half, 24-7, when 95
percent of the time it could flow smoothly through those intersections
with barely a lift off the accelerator.

This has been proven time and again. Look westward a few km to Waterloo and the Wellington Region. 70 percent - SEVENTY PERCENT! - fewer crashes at roundabouts than at the former 'conventional' intersections they replaced.

My understanding is that Ontario's
'official' highway building policy is that a roundabout is at least
supposed to be 'considered' during the planning phase.

Maybe it wasn't 'considered' in this
case because as I said, the planning for this project obviously happened before the planning
of the pyramids, before the Ontario policy was put in place.

The policy SHOULD be that a roundabout be the PRIMARY option for ANY intersection, unless there's a good reason not to build one.

Not that I can think of a reason why just about any intersection shouldn't be a roundabout.

There's another possible factor at play here. The Regional Municipality of Halton includes the conurbations of Burlington and Oakville in the south, Milton in the middle, and the fabricated 'town' of Halton Hills - essentially, "what's left" - consisting of Acton, Georgetown, and the surrounding countryside in the north.

I have
always assumed that on the map in the Halton Region Head Office in Burlington, the area north of the 401
is marked "Here Be Dragons".

Because Milton, south of the 401, gets
roundabouts.

They work a
treat there, as they do everywhere.

Yes, there can be a bit of a learning curve.

But pretty much every society in the world
figures them out.

We can too.

Maybe the Regional officials figure us rubes up north
of the 401 can't handle them.

One semi-common exception is high-end restaurants; perhaps there it would seem crass to think you'd be dissuaded from trying Chef Antoine's latest creation by a price that was lower by just a few cents.

Besides, with the penny now officially abolished in Canada...

There may be another marketing gambit going on here. I think people with real jobs (as opposed to freelance automotive journalists...) get paid every two weeks; a bi-weekly hit for your car might make it easier to budget.

Understand though that if you are paid monthly, depending on which day the bi-weekly payment comes due, there might be three payments due in a given month.

From talking with sales people, I gather it isn't always - maybe not even mainly - the actual selling price of the car that matters; it's whether the customer can carry the loan payment (or lease payment), whether (s)he can afford to pay for the vehicle on an on-going basis.

I guess whatever keeps the rolling stock rolling out the door is good for business...

July 10, 2013

But we can be ever thankful that we
weren't in Calgary, Medicine Hat, or the appropriately-named High
River Alberta.

Or more recently, the benighted town of
Lac-Mégantic Québec.

We never really got all that much rain
out here at Kenzie World Headquarters. Usually, the first sparrow
that lands on a power line puts our hydro out.

This time it was The Big Smoke that got
- well, smoked.

GO Trains and subways flooded.

If ever "TTC" stood for "Take
The Car", this was it.

Yeah, some highways were flooded for a
while too.

But the car was, as usual, "The
Better Way".

We were trying to take a test car back
to Courtesy Chevrolet at The Queensway and 427 that afternoon.

Lady Leadfoot had the car and actually
managed to get it there. I was to met her there and ferry (ha ha
ha... ) her home.

I knew 427 was FUBAR, so I thought I'd
try the older Highway 27, forgetting that south of Dixon Road, it
simply merges IN to 427.

After sitting there stationary for
maybe 45 minutes, I figured - this is nuts.

During the interim moments of cell
availability - the network was overloaded for most of that time - she
and I were able to communicate.

She said the dealership was closed
because their power was out, so we agreed she'd work her way back
home, I'd do the same, and we'd figure something out for the test car
later.

A gentleman who had dropped his car off
for service at Courtesy while he went to the Caribbean for a week or
so was planning on taking a taxi from the dealership to the airport.

Not gonna happen. Even taxis couldn't
get there.

So Lady Leadfoot gave him a ride to
Pearson. Probably saved his vacation. I thought that was awfully kind
of her...

So: how do I get home?

Still southbound but stopped on 427, I
three-point turned, and four-way-flashed my way northbound on the
inner southbound shoulder back to Dixon Road.

Double advantage of driving a huge
Porsche Cayenne Turbo S at the time; with massive ground clearance
and four-wheel drive, it would wade through pretty much anything.

And if I was driving the wrong way on a
shoulder - well, it's a Porsche! What would anyone else expect?

(My apologies to Porsche owners
everywhere who do drive politely. But you do know the stereotype you
labour under. Difference between a Porsche and a porcupine...).

There were no traffic lights working
anywhere, but everyone was behaving fairly well.

I even tried to score a few Brownie
points for the badge by letting people go ahead of me.

I know a short cut on an access road
that runs along the southern boundary of the airport. I
figured that would get me at least as far as Dixie Road reasonably
quickly.

So I turned down Carlingview, then right on Renforth, then right again.

A lake had formed to the south of that access road;
a car was already submerged therein, water running over the hood -
and the headlights were still on!

Huh?

You'd have thought that when the driver
'abandoned car' he'd have shut the electrics off.

Nope.

Wouldn't want to see the repair bill
for that one.

That plan was foiled - someone (the
airport authority, maybe?) had blocked that road off.

So, back onto Renforth, then westward
on the 401, expecting another long slow slog home.

Nope again.

Hardly a soul on the highway.

I guess people were still stuck within
the city limits and couldn't get that far.

There must be a fine line between
taking advantage of others' misfortune, and making the best of a bad
situation.

But a lightly-travelled highway, a very
powerful car, and the near-certain knowledge that the police would be
otherwise engaged?

Let's just say I hit the speed limit
twice - once on the way up...

There were at least two cars on the
highway with only their Daytime Running Lights on - no taillights. I
rail against this all the time - with only DRL (hence only front
lights working for the vast majority of cars, but with dashboard
lights on) there's no indication that you are nearly invisible to
those approaching from behind, especially in inclement weather like
this.

I high-beam-flashed and honked at the
first guy; he figured it out and switched on.

The other was still on the highway as I
took my exit. I thought about chasing him down, but I just wanted to
get home.

I know how easily you can be fooled by
DRL. A couple of weeks ago, Lady Leadfoot was following me on another
car swap adventure. She had to honk and wave at me because I had
forgotten to switch my real lights on. Very unusual for me because
that's part of my drill.

When is Transport Canada going to do
something about this? Either force DRL to also include taillights, or
at least require that DRL NOT allow dash lighting, so as to give
drivers a hint that they are in danger?

Even the 'AUTO' setting you find on
many newer cars isn't sufficient, because the sensors aren't always
sensitive enough.

Until car makers fix this, or the
government mandates this, you should make a point of always using all your
lights, all the time.

Except of course, your fog lights. But
that's another story...

The heaviest rain I encountered -
indeed, maybe the heaviest rain I have ever encountered anywhere -
was on the last 1.5 km to my house along my sideroad. Just a brief
burst. I now have an 'infinity' pool...

But our lights were on, so all was
good.

Lady Leadfoot got home about 20 minutes
later. It had taken her a while to get to the airport from The
Queensway, but once on the 401, it was clear, um, sailing for her
too.

And while the Porsche officials
responsible for making the Cayenne will still burn in hell for
eternity for putting their sacred badge on a 6,000 pound Volkswagen
truck, I could have been a lot worse off...

We finally got the Chevy test car back
to Courtesy on Tuesday.

Their power was still out, as were all
the traffic lights within Etobicoke.

Got to thinking - I wonder how many
fender-benders there were during this period? I wonder if maybe with
no traffic control measures at all, did we actually drive better?

That would confirm the theory of the
late Dutch urban planner Hans Monderman, who found that removing all
signs, stop lights, lane markings, crosswalks, etc., and forcing
everyone to just get along and figure it all out, that safety
actually improved.

There was no doubt whatsoever though,
that if all those intersections had been roundabouts, traffic would
have moved much more freely, even with the power out.

Hydro down? No traffic lights?

No worries.

Another reason (as if more were needed)
that we should be converting every intersection into a roundabout as
soon as possible.

We took The Queensway west into
Mister-and-Mississauga. Once across the border into Hazelland, the
traffic lights were working again.

Don't think she can take credit for
that.

Just past Hurontario I think it was,
the black Audi to my left with a dealer plate on it (presumably from
the nearby Audi dealer) started to slow down quite markedly. As a
firm believer in local knowledge, I figured he knew something I
didn't.

I scanned way down the road, and sure
enough - there was a Peel Regional police officer with a laser gun.

Really?

We've just gone through the storm of
the century (so far anyway), your colleagues are out saving people's
lives and property - and you're running a speed trap?

Come on.

Glad he wasn't out on the 401 the
evening before...

My sympathies to those who suffered on
this rough day.

But there was at least one bright
moment.

I heard on the radio of one woman who
was trapped in her car - I think it was on Simcoe Street near Front.

A not-so-sanitary sewer had backed up,
and she was stuck inside with stinking raw sewage lapping at the
rocker panels.

Her husband must have been nearby,
because he waded through the muck, pulled her out through the window,
and carried her to dry land.

July 09, 2013

We have ever-tightening emissions controls on our cars, costing each of us hundreds if not thousands of extra dollars every time we buy a new car.

This despite the fact - as shown on the web site of Environment Canada, no less - that cars and light trucks are responsible for only twelve percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

And that is for our entire fleet, old and new cars alike. The average lifespan of a car these days is somewhere around ten years, so a lot of the cars out there are nowhere near as clean as new ones.

Quite literally, in most urban centres, the exhaust coming out of a new car's tailpipe is cleaner than the air going into the engine.

Sure, it'd be nice if cars' contribution were zero percent.

But even if it were, shouldn't we be looking harder at whatever is causing that 88 percent, instead of always blaming the car?

Most provincial jurisdictions in Canada also have some form of 'E-Test', which is required on a regular basis in order to keep your vehicle registered.

What I'd like to know is, who is looking after transport trucks?

I was driving westbound on 401 just past Mister-and-Missisauga Road last Tuesday, around 2:30 p.m. There's an uphill grade there, and a transport truck - a bright blue cab; couldn't see the name or a truck number - pulling a tanker trailer.

He was obviously pulling a heavy load up that grade, and in the words of Earl Gray and Carl Montgomery in the song "Six Days on the Road" (first recorded by Dave Dudley):

"There's a flame from her stack and the smoke's rollin' black as coal..."

OK, so there was no flame in this case.

But there was more black smoke rollin' out of this one truck than you'd see from a thousand cars.

Who is monitoring these things?

Makes it hard to justify in our own minds the money we're laying out for pollution control measures when we see something like this.

July 04, 2013

The Honda store in Burlington has a similar collection - maybe even more of them.

Think maybe they wish they had something like that to sell new today?

The S2000 was launched in 1999, and had a ten-year lifespan.

As I recall, it was like driving a Miata that cost twice as much.

Until the engine hit somewhere around 4,200 r.p.m.

Then it was like a second engine joined the party.

The V-TEC - Honda's variable valve timing and lift system - kicked in, the engine screamed to a 9,000-plus r.p.m. red line, you caught the next gear, and away you went all over again.

It had to be the most intense two-litre car you could buy - maybe ever.

They had their flaws. If you were over 5' 8", chances are you couldn't see out the windshield with hunching down.

They had terrific grip - until they didn't, and then they had none.

A friend of mine who had owned a series of 911 Porsches and was not unfamiliar with tricky handling, swapped his 911 with his buddy's new S2000 one evening, coming back from the golf course.

He woke up in the hospital. He had done some high-speed farming in a local corn field.

Second-generation S2000s had the rear suspension retuned to tame this tendency.

But the biggest thing the S2000 has to live down is the starter button.

I've railed on this before.

But the biggest improvement for the last car my Dad ever bought - a 1954 Meteor - was that compared to the 1949 Ford my brother had driven into a cement culvert the previous Saturday evening was that the starter function was incorporated into the ignition key!

One click for accessories, one more click for ignition, and a final click against a spring load for the starter.

Nobel Prize stuff!!

But Honda decided it had to go back to the 1930s...

The Bentley Turbo R did the same thing around the same time - not sure who was first, but it's nothing to brag about.

An example of great minds thinking alike - only badly.

What a shame every other car maker seems to be following them down this false path.

That apart, Honda could really use something with the intensity the S2000 represented.

'Whips' is apparently the term applied to vehicles of this nature. Not sure where the terminology came from, except maybe that's what these cars do to your neck if you try to take a corner at anything faster than a walking pace.

And what 'chocolate' has to do with it - well, maybe like bacon, what isn't made better with the addition of chocolate?

I know this all smacks of creeping - heck, galloping - old fart-ism.

But like kids who seem to want to drive their slammed Civics while sitting on the floor in the back seat, I've just never understood why it's 'cool' to flaunt the laws of physics.

I mean, from time immemorial, kids have tried to be cool by doing stupid things.

Maybe it's just part of growing up.

Look at photos of my hair cut when I was a teenager.

Or maybe you shouldn't...

And maybe like the 'Chinpokomon' episode of South Park, if older people think something IS cool, younger people will instantly disown it.

Then again, THAT episode of South Park is fourteen years old.

Kids driving 'Whips' have probably never seen it.

Never mind. I am not going back to my Ovaltine and oatmeal; bring your 'whips' out to Mosport some day and I'll 'whip' your ass.